Connections, memory, Wales

[redbird]

Sometimes it is very cool the way my friendships are connected, and one friend mentions a memory that carries with it the thought of other friends, not because they were in that moment but because without them, we wouldn't have been.

I'm being elliptical lately--for reasons that seem good to me--but I'll unpack this one: elisem said some extremely cool things about me (and, being Elise, did so in a way that I am not at all inclined to describe as flattering). Her mention of the shore is a specific physical shore: the Gower, in Wales, and we wouldn't have been there if not for papersky (all my Welsh memories connect to her, and I may never visit Wales again) and rysmiel.

And now I'm remembering other bits of that week: not just the time in Hay--books and ice cream and Shakespeare's Tam Lin and the paths we couldn't follow because of the foot-and-mouth outbreak-- but weeding the badly overgrown back garden (which connects to Elise no longer being allergic to bees) and nibbling ripe berries as I cut back the brambles.

But my time-binding is weak enough that I'm not sure whether the skylark was on that visit to the Gower, or the other, the first time I visited Swansea. I think the castle was a different trip. The castle in Swansea, I mean--I'm sure Cardiff Castle was, but Cardiff Castle is a folly, a weird Victorian re-creation that we didn't pay the extra to go inside, whereas the ruins in Swansea have fallen down gently, with grass growing in the roofless rooms, and a great impulse to decide who gets which room and what we'd do with that bit there. The old watermill/museum visit was that week with Elise and Juan there, which I know because Elise bought scraps of brightly colored fabric to combine with the yarn she'd spun (from wool that I, and she, had gathered on a hillside) and make a doll for zorinth.

I don't exactly miss Swansea. The Gower a little, maybe. But it wasn't the landscape, pleasant though sea-cliffs and watching the tide and the sheep wandering loose were. It was being there with Papersky, whose home it was: walks back up from the duck pond past a house where she knew the resident dog, and the buses, and the shop around the corner for bread in the morning. Montreal is different, and in many ways more my kind of place--but they're both important to me for who lives there, for having family to see and hold.

Comments

[kip-w.livejournal.com]

When a memory brings other memories to mind, I call it a mnemory.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

"We'll always have Paris."

By which I mean you don't have to miss it, you had it, you were there, if you went there now it wouldn't be the same. By which I mean I don't have to miss it.

I miss the sea. I miss the sea a lot.